Deep Dive Into Direct Lake, Semantic Link and Data Activator for Power BI
Microsoft Fabric is the future of data analytics and is a unified analytics platform that provides a comprehensive set of services for data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. It is built on the Power BI Service platform and offers a single location and source of truth for all data, enabling organizations to make better decisions faster.
What you’ll learn
- Direct Lake for Power BI.
- Semantic Link for Power BI.
- Data Activator for Power BI.
- Microsoft Fabric integration with Power BI, Direct Lake, Semantic Link and Data Activator.
Course Content
- Introduction –> 3 lectures • 11min.
- Power BI and Direct Lake –> 8 lectures • 1hr 45min.
- Power BI and Semantic Link –> 3 lectures • 31min.
- Power BI and Data Activator –> 2 lectures • 28min.
- Exercises –> 1 lecture • 2min.
Requirements
Microsoft Fabric is the future of data analytics and is a unified analytics platform that provides a comprehensive set of services for data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. It is built on the Power BI Service platform and offers a single location and source of truth for all data, enabling organizations to make better decisions faster.
Microsoft Fabric is designed to help organizations of all sizes overcome the challenges of big data analytics, such as data silos, data complexity, and data security. It provides a unified platform that makes it easy to collect, store, process, and analyze data from any source, in real time.
Power BI is a business intelligence (BI) and data visualization tool that helps people turn their data into actionable insights. It provides a variety of features to help users connect to data, clean and prepare data, create and share reports and dashboards, and interact with data in a meaningful way.
Power BI is a popular choice for BI because it is easy to use, affordable, and scalable. It can be used by businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises. It is tightly integrated into Microsoft Fabric.
Direct Lake is a new feature in Microsoft Fabric and it is a game changer for Power BI developers. It eliminates the need for traditional Import mode datasets in Power BI but, yet, maintains the same performance level of import mode datasets. It offers:
- Improved performance: Direct Lake provides similar performance to Import mode, even for very large datasets. This is because Direct Lake loads data on-demand (on-demand loading) from the data lakehouse, rather than importing it into Power BI.
- Reduced latency: Direct Lake eliminates the need for dataset refreshes, so users can see the latest data in their reports and dashboards immediately.
- Increased scalability: Direct Lake allows users to analyze very large datasets in Power BI without having to worry about performance or scalability issues.
- Simplified data management: Direct Lake makes it easier to manage data in Power BI, as there is no need to import or refresh datasets.
- Reduced costs: Direct Lake can help to reduce Power BI costs by eliminating the need to store imported data.
Semantic Link is a feature in Microsoft Fabric that enables users to connect Power BI datasets with Synapse Data Science. This allows data scientists, data analysts and BI developers to access and analyze Power BI data directly from within their Fabric notebooks, using popular tools and libraries such as Pandas and Spark.
Semantic Link also propagates semantic information from Power BI to Fabric, which can be used to enhance data science tasks such as data augmentation, validation, and exploration.
Data Activator is a no-code experience in Microsoft Fabric that empowers BI developers to drive actions automatically from their Power BI data. It monitors data in Power BI reports (or Eventstreams items), for when the data hits certain thresholds or matches other patterns. It then automatically takes appropriate action such as alerting users or kicking off Power Automate flows. It offers:
- Alerting users when key metrics go above or below certain thresholds
- Automatically sending notifications when new data is available
- Triggering workflows to automate tasks such as data preparation, model training, and report generation